A Lease on Life
by redcat512
Summary: Once upon a time you prayed to a god you didn't believe in that you might live and you did, but instead of god, it was the devil who was listening.


Every time you turn your back on one of your own for even a second, they seem to die. Not you, though, because once upon a time you prayed to a god you didn't believe in that you might live and you did, but instead of god, it was the devil who was listening. Now you're here forever at the cost of the lives around you because He is a fucker like that.

* * *

People never believe you when you tell them you won't die.

It's stupid, really, because they could learn from your follies if they did, but humans never were prone to learning from the mistakes of others.

* * *

You were nineteen when you were in a car accident.

It seems so silly, such a mundane way for the great Double Oh Seven to die, but that's how it happened. You weren't even driving, it was a taxi. You were drunk and so you decided to do the responsible thing and catch a cab back home, but that didn't stop the other driver from putting a van through half of the cab. If you'd been on the other side, on the right, you'd have been dead instantly like the cabbie.

You were too far in shock to feel pain then, but you remember fear and the distant thought that _this can't be happening_. There's a moment there, when you think you might have prayed, for all that you'd been an avid atheist since you were old enough to question your elders. Whether it was prayer or not, you clearly recall the words _please let me live_ passing through your mind, and maybe your lips.

Surely it's mere fancy that you felt an icy breeze answer _wish granted_.

* * *

It is years later when you realise that there's something uncanny about your luck. You are injured more times per annum than any other surviving field agent - even the dead ones don't come close to your numbers. You're reckless - you're well aware of that, but it's not the number so much as the intensity of the injuries that is notable, because you had a fifty-fifty chance of dying of half of them but yet here you are, almost two decades (of which the last portion was as a double oh) of field work later, still alive.

When you're near death, or about to be, or just were - that's when someone near you dies. You understand quid pro quo, you understand the conservation of energy/mass laws of physics. Nature hates a vacuum, and every time you haven't died, that vacuum has been filled by someone else.

You're not sure if you can die at all. There have only been some very half-hearted attempts on your part to drink yourself to death, but waking up in A&E on a cold November morning one time as a neighbouring patient chokes on his own vomit while the nurses are distracted by a gun-wielding low-life is enough of an experiment for you.

* * *

One day, when you're old and grey and dying (but never dead), a devious rake-thin man, or poisonously beautiful woman, or a smarmy youth or a vicious blonde little girl will approach you in your sad lonely old bed, and ask you if it was worth it.

You will take in the breath to curse at him/her and s/he will laugh because your lungs have long since stopped being powerful enough to do anything but draw in a breath.

S/he will leave you a single rose by your bed and you will not even be able to move enough to ring for the nurse, even if the bell has long since been disconnected.

Helplessness tears will roll down the sides of your face as you lie there, deteriorating decades after everyone you've ever known has died and you'll wish you'd died in a car accident when you were nineteen.

* * *

**End**

Oh my god that was so morbid, I don't even know where that came from. That's what happens when I write at 3 in the morning.

Inspirations are Captain Jack Harkness and that guy from The Green Mile, although I'm not sure how they ended up in Skyfall. Also inspired by _If You Care To Make A Dare_ by _TriffidsandCuckoos_ (archiveofourown fic ID 604505)

Now maybe the plot bunnies will let me go back to writing that q/bond Sherlock X-over...


End file.
